The Girl from Felony Bay (20 page)

“What do you think they're doing?” Bee whispered.

“It looks to me like they're burying the chest.”

“Why would they do that?”

I shook my head. “No idea,” I said, but that wasn't quite true. An idea had popped into my head, but it seemed so lowdown and preposterous that I didn't want to say it out loud.

When Bubba finished, he turned off the excavator's engine. A sudden silence settled over the night. The man in the shadows said something, and Uncle Charlie raised his hand in a wave. A second later a car door slammed, an engine started, and headlights went on. The car made a K-turn, and its lights panned over the area, but it was on the far side of the cabin. Bee and I ducked, but it wasn't necessary, because the lights never even came close to us. A second later, we caught a quick glimpse of taillights.

As the car disappeared, heading toward the township dirt road, Ruth came over and joined Bubba and Uncle Charlie. “What a jerk,” she said. “Can't be bothered to get his hands dirty.”

“Thinks he's got more to lose than everybody else,” Bubba growled.

Uncle Charlie gave an annoyed snort. “Let's get this place cleaned up and get some sleep.”

They spent the next few minutes walking around and picking up gas and oil cans and some trash, and then Bubba loaded the excavator onto a small trailer that was hooked to his pickup. Lastly Uncle Charlie and Ruth took some garden rakes and smoothed out the excavator's tread marks.

The three of them stood together again and looked at what they had done. “Looks good enough,” Uncle Charlie said. “People will be stomping it up pretty good once we bring them out here.”

Ruth nodded. “Let's go. I'm dead tired.”

They climbed into the trucks, and a second later I heard two engines start. Uncle Charlie pulled out first and then Bubba, and they both drove out toward the township road.

Bee and I waited two full minutes, letting the night sounds settle around us. Bugs buzzed and chittered, frogs peeped from One Arm Pond far behind us, and the occasional heron or other night bird cried out, but otherwise the night was silent. There were no voices, no rumbles of car or truck engines to signal anyone coming back.

I looked at my watch. Two fifteen. We had more than two hours until sunrise, and I thought it was a good bet that nobody else would come around. It would give us plenty of time to check things out and try to figure out what Uncle Charlie and the others were up to.

“Ready?” I asked.

Bee nodded and pushed out of the bushes and down onto the flat sand beach of Felony Bay. I followed, and we walked over to where Uncle Charlie had been standing just a short time ago and shined our lights down on the fresh pile of sand that now covered the crate.

“I wonder what's in there?” Bee said.

“Sounded heavy,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bee said. “Like iron or steel . . . or maybe gold. But why would they bury it here?”

“Because I don't think they're trying to hide it,” I said. “I think they want to pretend they found it.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“Yes, it does,” I said, finally putting voice to the ideas that had been taking shape in my brain. “It makes sense if it wasn't your gold to start with. It makes sense if it's not really old Confederate gold but gold that you stole.”

Bee looked at me, and she got it right away. “You think your uncle stole Miss Jenkins's gold and blamed your dad? But how could he have gotten to it, if it was locked up and only your dad knew the combination?”

“I don't know, but I can't think of any other reason why he would do this. And since we know my dad didn't steal Miss Jenkins's gold, this would explain where it went, wouldn't it?”

Bee sighed. “Okay, so how do we prove it?”

Bee's question stopped me cold. We might know what was going on, but we couldn't prove anything. It was going to be our word against Uncle Charlie's and Ruth's and Bubba Simmons's and one other person's we hadn't seen. And we were just two twelve-year-old girls.

Suddenly I saw the whole thing, just the way it was going to unfold. Uncle Charlie and Ruth were going to call the newspaper and the television stations and tell them they had made an amazing discovery. They would tell them to bring their cameras out to Felony Bay, where they would show them the hole they had dug and the treasure crate they had discovered. The papers and TV stations would buy it hook, line, and sinker. The gold they had stolen would become theirs, and nobody would challenge them . . . except a couple twelve-year-olds.

I felt my spirits plummet. “We can't prove any of it,” I said.

Bee poked me with her elbow. “Wait. This doesn't make sense. Miss Jenkins's jewelry would have obviously been newer than centuries-old Confederate gold, right? So even if your uncle found a way to steal it, he can't just ‘find' it. I mean, he's not stupid enough to try that, is he? There's got to be something we're missing.”

“You're right,” I said, thinking that Bee was thinking much more clearly than me.

“Come on,” she said, pointing toward the open door of the old cabin. “Let's look in there.”

We went to the door and pointed our lights inside what had once been the sitting room. Vines covered the doorjamb and snaked along the floor in long tendrils. Everything was layered with dust and rotting leaves and bird poop, but I could make out a brick fireplace to our left, and to our right a doorway that led to the kitchen and the bedrooms. As we stepped all the way inside, the sweet smell of the night disappeared, replaced by the odors of mildew and rot. I held my oleander stick out in front and shined my light on the floor, cautious of snakes, until I remembered that Uncle Charlie and Bubba had been in here. Their stomping around would have driven most snakes to find a safer spot.

Other than all the leaves that had blown in, the front room was still in decent shape, but the back of the house had started to lean to one side. When I stepped over and looked into the old kitchen, I could see the night sky through holes in the ceiling and rotten spots on the floor where the boards had fallen in. It looked very spooky, like it would probably be dangerous, not to mention full of nasty creatures like snakes and spiders and centipedes.

“Check this out,” Bee said.

When I pointed my light in her direction, I saw a piece of plywood in the middle of the floor that rested on two sawhorses and made a crude worktable. I went over and looked more closely. There were drops of something on the wood and circular burn marks on the end nearest the fireplace.

Bee trained her light on the fireplace. “Look,” she said, as her light revealed a pot that hung from an old wrought-iron hook over the fire pit. The pot was blackened around the bottom but still had shiny metal along the outer lip, as if it wasn't very old.

I went over to the fireplace and examined the pot and also the ashes in the fire pit.

“Somebody's been having fires in here,” I said.

“Too hot for fires,” Bee said.

“I know, but the ashes are still fluffy and all gathered together in a nice pile. Old ashes flatten out and get hard.”

Bee took the pot from the hook. She put it on the floor and shined her light down inside it. There was something smeared on the inside of the pot that looked like leftovers from somebody cooking butterscotch.

“What do you think this is?” Bee asked as she tapped her finger against it.

I used a fingernail to try to scrape some of the stuff off the inside of the pot. I couldn't get much, and it didn't look like anything I wanted to taste. “No idea.”

We brought the pot to the plywood table. The burn marks on the plywood seemed to match the size and shape of the pot bottom. I pointed that out to Bee. “Looks like they took the pot when it was hot and rested it here.”

Bee tapped the table around the blackened wood, where there were tiny splash marks the same color as the inside of the pot. “I think it's the same stuff,” she said. “Looks like they poured it out.”

I put my face down close and sniffed. “No smell.” I chipped at it with my fingernail, and a small bit came free. “It doesn't look like food,” I said, rolling it between my fingers. “What do you think they poured it into?”

“Who knows?”

“Keep looking,” I said. “We need to find more.” I had no idea exactly what we were looking for, but I was convinced we had stumbled onto something important.

We shined our lights over the rest of the plywood table and around the cabin but found nothing else. Finally my hopes started to plummet all over again when I thought about what we had: a pot with some melted stuff inside and our word against Uncle Charlie's that we'd seen him bury an old crate filled with something heavy. I knew what Daddy would say about such little evidence: that we couldn't prove a thing.

Out of desperation I dropped to my knees and started looking around on the floor underneath the table. That was when my light caught a momentary reflection. I crawled over to where I had seen the glint, but when I aimed my light right at it, I could see nothing but old wood boards with wide cracks between them.

I tried several more times, and only when I shined my light at the same angle I had the first time did I see the glint again. “Come over here. I think I found something,” I said. Bee came to my side of the table and added her light, and with the extra brightness I could see a metal object where it had fallen in the crack between the floorboards.

“What is it?” Bee asked.

“I think it's a piece of jewelry.”

“Miss Jenkins's?”

I took my knife from its sheath and slipped the blade into the crack. Taking great care, I worked the tip of the knife along one side of the crack, then pressed it against the metal thing and started to work it up and into the light.

Bee gasped as it came free. The ring looked like it was made out of silver, and it had a big, clear stone in the middle. “I think it's a diamond ring!” Bee said.

“You don't think it's a fake?” I asked.

She put her light on it, and we could both see the sparkles in the stone. “I don't know for sure, but I'm betting it's real,” she said.

I realized that the cabin was probably so dark even in daylight that it would have been invisible down between the floorboards and would have only shown up if somebody was really searching the way Bee and I had been. We had finally gotten a lucky break.

We were so intent on getting the ring that we didn't hear the truck engines outside until it was too late.

“Q
uick!” I said. “The flashlights!”

We clicked them off, throwing the cabin into total darkness. The caged feeling of tight space and the smells of wet wood and mold and mildew came rushing in on us. I stuffed the ring into the pocket of my blue jeans and shoved my knife back into its sheath. I reached out, groping in the dark, and found Bee's hand as the first flashlight beams approached the cabin.

“. . . said you had everything,” I heard Uncle Charlie say in an angry tone.

“I thought you'd gotten the stuff in the cabin when I was trailerin' the dozer,” Bubba Simmons said.

“I gotta do everything myself,” Uncle Charlie growled. “If I hadn't asked again, you could have blown everything.”

“Well, I didn't. We're takin' care of it, ain't we?”

They were coming fast and getting close. There was only one place to hide, even though the idea made my skin crawl.

“Come on,” I whispered. I tugged Bee's hand and used my other hand to feel my way toward the kitchen.

Lights from the men's flashlights were already hitting the cabin's front door when we stumbled into the back room. The musty odors of the cabin were twice as bad in there. It stank of wet, punky wood and rot. I thought of a swamp, of spiders as big as my hand, of stinging centipedes and poisonous snakes. Every surface seemed to crawl.

I heard heavy footsteps outside, and I jerked Bee to one side of the doorway. As I moved farther, my foot went through a rotten piece of floorboard. I started to fall and nearly jerked Bee off her feet as well, but I flailed blindly in the dark and caught the wall with my other hand.

My hand made a thumping noise against the wood, and I felt a sharp stab as a splinter stabbed into my palm. It was everything I could do not to cry out. My heart was pounding, and I could hear my pulse slamming against my eardrums.

Outside the cabin the flashlights stopped.

“You hear that?” Bubba growled.

“Yeah,” Uncle Charlie said. “Probably just a possum or raccoon.”

“Suppose,” Bubba said, not sounding too sure.

A second later their flashlight beams sliced through the cabin's darkness as they came inside.

“Okay, grab one end of this plywood,” Uncle Charlie ordered.

Their feet shuffled, and they went out slowly. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my racing nerves enough to think. As my eyes once again grew accustomed to the cabin's total darkness, I could see the outline of a lighter opening along the kitchen's back wall. As my eyes adjusted further, I could make out moonlight gleaming off leaves outside.